Constellation Games (21 page)

I got a little work done today, but any day when I have to get up at five in the morning is pretty much destined for low productivity. In the afternoon while eating an avocado sandwich over my kitchen sink, I was thinking about the Inostrantsi. As the Constellation talks progress, people on TV (I'm still watching TV, it's like a disease, sorry, Jenny) have been talking a lot about the previous contact missions. But they're conspiciously not mentioning the one where
the entire fucking civilization collapsed due to environmental degradation
. Which would seem to have some bearing on our present situation.

Back when I was first going through the Constellation Database of Electronic Games of a Certain Complexity, I noticed that most of the Inostrantsi games were in the database twice. At the time, I kind of wrote it off as a minor mystery/mistake in the database. But actually all the Inostrantsi games were
remade
, ten thousand years later, as part of a cultural reboot.

I licked smashed avocado off my fingers, imaginining myself ten years from now, huddling in a Constellation-run refugee camp. People are always huddling in refugee camps, even when they're alone. I'm huddling by myself and Tetsuo Milk is my fucking social worker, he hands me a Genesis controller and has me play "Sonic & Cipher" as therapy.

Among the crates of hardware and aftermarket accessories Curic sent me in July, was the Massmonger 31, which I described at the time as "look[ing] like a roll of heavy-gauge chicken wire." I don't know how I'd design a computer for someone the size and shape of a kelp plant, but I'd probably include a screen, or controls.

At the time, the Brain Embryo had seemed a lot more interesting, so I'd stuffed the Massmonger 31 in a closet with all the other hardware I mentioned in that blog post. But now the Brain Embryo is work, and a low-productivity day means you don't have to do much work. My new translation assistant doesn't start work until tomorrow, so why waste time today trying to figure out
Sayable Spice
?

So the chain-link computer started to seem pretty good, with its games with super-emo names like
The Rest at the End of a Long Journey
and
Not Everything Is Real
. According to the CDBOEGOACC, the MassMonger 31 was named to coincide with a big Inostrantsi Olympic-type event. I decided to take a break from eating avocado sandwiches and at least get the computer running.

So I pulled the Massmonger 31 out of the closet. It's about the dimensions of an oil drum, though it weighs practically nothing because I've got a Constellation cerametal replica instead of whatever you make computers out of so they work in liquid methane. I set it on the kitchen table and popped some big clasps, and three feet of chain-link peeled off and dangled over the edge of the table like Satan's toilet paper.

Now I could see some controls, maybe. Small metal flowers, lifting themselves on springs out of the dangling chain-link, bouncing around frictionless. I rolled out eight feet of the chain-link onto the floor and the whole thing was covered with the little probes, waving around like bonito flakes on okonomiyaki.

I did what I should have done in the first place and went to Wikipedia.

Language

Inostrantsi languages convey meaning through structured direct manipulation of the sense appendages. Two Inostrantsi communicate by grasping each other and synchronizing one set of sense appendages. A single individual may take part in several conversations simultaneously. One-to-many communication is also common, with listeners receiving linguistic symbols and passing them on through a circular or treelike network.

Okay, whatever. I sent Jenny an IM:

ABlum:
if you come over tonight and i'm dead, tell them to classify it as an accident

I set down the phone and lay on the chain-link fence. I pressed my sense appendages against some of the probes, squishing them. Other probes sat silent against my arms. "All right, do your stuff."

The probes didn't move. I didn't get tentacle-raped. But my phone went beep.

OMJennyG:
Whatever you're doing, STOP!!

Fuck! Girls ruin everything.

Long story short, I have figured out why nobody talks about the collapse of Inostrantsi civilization. We have no fucking clue what it's like to be an immortal asexual deaf-mute kelp plant. And no way of finding out except by talking to Inostrantsi, which isn't happening because we've kinda stopped talking to the Constellation altogether. So we're screwed. See you at the cultural reboot.

I've stuffed the Massmonger 31 under the kitchen table—I can't get it to roll back up all the way.

Update, 1 hour later:

OMJennyG:
After the apocalypse you won't be playings sonic games
You'll be programming remakes of sonic for other people to play
IOW, get back to work!

Knock knock. Who's there? It's the third employee of Crispy Duck Games! And her boyfriend.

"Hey, bro," said Bai, standing on my porch.

"Big day!" I said. "Your lady's a breadwinner."

"Yeah," said Bai, who wasn't sure what emotion to have.

"Hi, Ariel!" said Svetlana Sveta. Svetlana is our new part-time translator and localizer, resident expert on Farang culture, and mistress of our smart-paper Edink translation software.

"Hi, Svetlana," I said. "You're looking great. Can you take off your sunglasses, please? I want to be able to see your eyes."

"Sure thing, Mister B.," said Svetlana, and folded up her huge tortoise-shell sunglasses.

"I asked her to wear a normal outfit," Bai whispered to me. Instead, Svetlana was dressed to impress in a green business suit with huge shoulderpads, the blazer of which she'd covered in garish collectible pins. I was outclassed. I had to look down at my feet to make sure I was even wearing socks.

"We'll meet at the Dog Pound at six and I'll drop her off," I told Bai. Bai and Svetlana kissed goodbye in a way some might consider unseemly, and Bai went off to work at the wind turbine company.

"Poor Bai," said Svetlana. "He's going to be jealous. Me spending all day at your house."

"Well, I can't afford a fucking office," I said showing her inside. "Maybe we could work at Jenny's place. Or a cheap motel room."

"Did you know he still has that silly virtual girlfriend program? He takes it to work with him. Only now...now he's made the girl look like
me
." Svetlana considered this a personal triumph, not without reason.

"So here's the localization department," I said, "also known as the living room. We have the couch, and the TV, and the Brain Embryo."

Svetlana held her smart paper against the TV screen. "For a light-emitting source like a television, we'll do passthrough translation. Can you scale the image down so that it fits on the paper?"

"No," I said, "but I can get a smaller TV." In this blog post, the role of my television will be played by my computer monitor.

I turned on the Brain Embryo and set the all-in-one pirate cart to...

GAME REVIEWS OF LIES LIES LIES 2.0 PRESENTS
Sayable Spice
(c. 40 million years ago)
A game by Clan Interference
Reviewed by Ariel Blum

Publisher:
Clan Interference
Platform:
Brain Embryo
ESRB Rating:
M, just in case

"What about the RF emitters?" I said, propping them up. "Can you visualize that for me?"

"That would be pretty, but useless," said Svetlana. "You would prefer for me to describe what's happening in Farang terms."

The smart paper went 'transparent,' passing through the video signal from the TV behind it. "Here we go," I said. "The 'taboo' had better not be any weird sex shit."

"File that under 'unlikely,'" said Svetlana. "Farang have the sex lives of oysters." A Edink symbol-graph scrolled onto the screen, and her software drew an English translation on top of it:

When you were a child, was there a taste
perhaps a child-food you ate often
that didn't seem important at the time,
perhaps a {{{shellfish}}} or other animal
whose taste changed as you grew up?

Some people spend their entire lives
craving a taste that has dissolved in the ocean of time.
You will not recapture the past through your {{{taste membranes}}}.
It needs to be squeezed from your memories.

Clan Interference will show you the
SAYABLE SPICE
Begin this game in the usual way

"That's downright melancholy," I said. "What's happening with the radio emitter?"

"Snap crackle pop," said Svetlana. "It sounds like a fish."

"How does a fish sound?"

"Sea animals," said Svetlana, "communicate with each other in the RF. That's how Farang catch them and eat them. The game is saying there's a fish nearby."

"To make you hungry?"

"Make you think of food. It's not related to Earth fish. That's just an analogy."

"Yeah, I got it."

I started the game. In the Alien remake of
Sayable Spice
, the player character is a person (ie. an Alien), but here I'm a blob. "Okay," I said, "Supposedly this blob is part of somebody's brain."

"A memory tomia," said Svetlana. "It's how Farang back then thought the brain worked. Your job is to coordinate memories between the male and female halves of the brain."

"And is this a real thing, or is it some made-up bullshit, like the superego?"

"I have no idea," said Svetlana. "I'm not a Farang. Bai wouldn't like it if I spent half my time as a man."

Your job as the memory tomia is to create an association interesting enough to catch the attention of the conscious mind. I went through the first hour of the game, collecting chemical compounds. Svetlana translated the name of each one as I picked it up and slid into a slot of the memory tomia.

"Are these real chemicals?" I asked her.

"Let's find out," said Svetlana. She instructed me how to combine the chemicals. I clicked and thwapped and slid the keys of the abacus controller in big batches as she read off the names of the compounds.

"I don't know if they're real chemicals," she said after a few minutes. "but they make real foods. Kewe si, stewed recency vine, mejh... oh. This is probably it. The one you just formed. Saturated infant comb."

"Is that a food, or a Farang indie rock band?"

"It's food," said Svetlana. "This should be interesting. Go ahead and trigger the flashback."

I'd never had the ingredients to trigger a
Sayable Spice
flashback before, but Tetsuo Milk and I explored a lot of the ones in
Recapture That Remarkable Taste
, using his knowledge of the Ip Shkoy Aliens. Here's my cleaned-up translation of the "pakpapur pod" flashback from the Alien remake. The player character is thinking back to her first lover, and the player controls an imaginary post-coital conversation between the two. It can go different ways, but this is the most interesting way I got it to come out:

PC (Female)
: Why am I even thinking about you? Am I supposed to blame you for a lifetime of unsatisfying sex?

NPC (Male)
: I'm easy to remember because of the pakpapur pod that exploded on your family's cooker.

Female:
We thought it would set the mood.

Male:
You're not supposed to set it directly on the heating element. It's there in the small print.

Female:
You had such gentle hindarms. A man is supposed to have nice hindarms.

Male:
They tell you that?

Female:
Yeah, in sex ed. And then you grow up and find nice hindarms don't count for shit.

Male:
You don't need to tell me. Where did I end up with my sweet-ass hindarms? I'm probably eating meat-flavored leaves from a cup right now.

Female:
Wanna fuck again?

Male:
I'm not really here. I'm the smell of pakpapur in your shopping backpack. You're climbing down to your home level and you're about to lose your grip on the ladder.

Female:
Crap!

[Gameplay resumes.]

Pretty harmless—I'm trying to get that scene optioned for a romantic comedy, actually—but the Ip Shkoy, for all their faults, were a lot more comprehensible to humans than the Dhihe Coastal Coalition. I steeled myself and triggered the flashback. Honestly, with a name like "saturated infant comb," I was expecting cannibalism from this fucker.

"Big burst of static in the RF," said Svetlana. "Various sounds suggesting indistinct chatter."

The on-screen scene changes to what passes for realism on the Brain Embryo hardware. It's the traditional bottom-up view. The blob is gone and instead the screen shows about twenty Farang, all of them crowding around a large round box near the top of the screen.

Wait, twenty? No other Farang game has NPCs, unless you count the zombies in
Gatekeeper
. Haven't seen a single Farang in
Sayable Spice
so far, and now there are twenty?

I slapped some controller beads around; one of the Farang moved a little and the TV did its best to reproduce "indistinct chatter" in a human range.

"Is this the taboo part?" I said. "Are non-player characters taboo?"

"Have you ever seen two Farang in the same place?" asked Svetlana.

"I've never seen two Farang, period," I said. "Are they hermits?"

"Have you been to Curic's house?"

"Yeah, she's got a private island. But, I mean,
I'd
like a private island."

"Aliens are social carnivores," said Svetlana. "Humans are pack animals. Farang are alpha predators, the most dangerous things in the ocean. They're very territorial; they don't even meet to breed." I remembered Curic in the passenger seat of Bai's SUV, telling us about leaving genetic material in tide pools.

"You'll never get more than seven Farang in one place," Svetlana continued. "That's why the clans are so small. That's why their technology advanced so slowly. That's why they didn't wipe themselves out before the Constellation found them."

"And here's
Sayable Spice
shoving fifteen, twenty dude/chicks in your face," I said.

"These are children," said Svetlana. "Children are scooped out of birth pools and raised collectively. They eat infant comb that's been soaked in food regurgitated by adults. Once you start catching your own food, you're supposed to stop eating the infant comb. You're supposed to form a clan and leave school."

"And then you don't talk about this. The other people."

"But maybe you get nostalgic for it," said Svetlana. "If you're the kind of clan who makes video games. You think about what you could accomplish if your clan were larger. You might even start to miss the infant comb."

"Okay, this we can put in the remake," I said. "It's just like the school cafeteria, everyone lining up for their sloppy joe and their box of milk. But nobody's going to feel nostalgia for that shit. Nobody misses elementary school. We won't be breaking any taboos."

"I guess you have to decide how much of
Sayable Spice
you want to remake," said Svetlana, "Do you want a game that says something, or do you just want the cute flavor-matching mechanic?"